Distopia brasilis: o mito de Narciso e Eco nos atos performativos de fala racista.

Abstract

The work proposes to examine racist discourse from the perspective of performative speech acts. To this end, we will consider that racist speech makes use of a trauma that goes through who the speech is directed at, gaining its strength by being uttered, repeated and embodied. With regard to performativity, John Austin's (1990) performative speech act will be adopted as a basis, which postulates that we can do something with words and also cause expected or unexpected effects. Initially, we will discuss the universality of the philosophical tradition of language that, by excluding the racial issue in search of a single enclosure, ends up excluding subjects from the analysis. The desire for the universal will be problematized through the myth of Narcissus and his meeting with Eco, however from Grada Kilomba (2019a) to observe in this myth the spoliations caused by racist discourse and colonial ties. In order to be able to investigate the performativity of the racist utterance, we will introduce and debate the concept of dissolution to demonstrate, through criticism, transition processes of questioning. In this sense, given the Austinian limitation in investigating the meaning of words in their historical use and structural character, we will explore the citational-historical perspective of performative speech acts in Judith Butler (2020). This makes it possible to analyze the performativity of the racist speech act and its capacity to hurt, since words, when quoted and repeated historically, fix their meaning, formulating and reformulating subjects, as well as breaking with conventional meaning, finding different uses and enabling other subjects. Associated with the anti-racist perspective of Grada Kilomba (2019b), we will investigate the alterity bias contained in the contract between speaker and listener, exposing the concept of otherness as a perlocution of the performativity of racist speech. Incorporating historicity and a racial debate into performative speech acts, in this work, highlights a dystopian scenario agreed upon by whiteness, since it uses performativity to plunder and send to death those who do not share Narciso's universe, Dystopia brasilis. Finally, we express how the ability to act to and by saying something is established in networks of complex subordinations in the procedure, but also exposes the vulnerability of what is said, and may find new meanings in its use.